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Comment by Amezarak | Hacker News Reader

> I studied political sciences twenty years ago - even then it was established consensus that presidential democracies are vulnerable to authoritarian takeover.

Democracies are vulnerable to "authoritarian takeover" has been known and understood for 2500 years.

> The position has too much power, is easily abused and there are not enough checks on that position.

In most parliamentary democracies, the Prime Minister is much more powerful than the US President. This is particularly the case since the PM is PM by virtue of his party having the legislative majority.

> And all who cry "if the democrats win everything will be ok again!!!!" - not it won't.

A better argument would be that this isn't a partisan issue. The last President declared a Constitutional Amendment by fiat and attempted to do (good) things like student loan relief with blatantly illegal authoritarian methods due to the perpetual Congressional gridlock.

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> In most parliamentary democracies, the Prime Minister is much more powerful than the US President. This is particularly the case since the PM is PM by virtue of his party having the legislative majority.

This is a grave misunderstanding. A legislative majority isn't a static historical fact like Trump's electoral majority, it's dynamic - those are identifiable people not just a statistic.

Liz Truss was the UK's Prime Minister for less than two months. What changed in two months? Probably most of the idiots who actually voted for her didn't change their minds, but that doesn't matter, her fellow Tory MPs feared the worst from the outset and were proven correct. If she hadn't left she'd have been kicked out, she's known to have actually asked if there's some way she can cling on and been told basically "No" because there isn't.

Ultimately, if they can't get rid of her any other way, her backbench only needs to affirm a simple motion, "That This House Has No Confidence In His Majesty's Government" and it's all over. It would never come to that, but that's the backstop.

Congress can also agree to remove the President. Indeed it would take only a few Rs to flip to do so.

We see PMs easily enacting massive legislative reforms and even Constitutional changes that are nigh impossible in the US, that was not a particularly controversial statement.

Congress could, in theory, begin an arduous process (weeks? months?) in which eventually, if they succeed, again in theory it removes the President and... puts in his place his chosen replacement. It has never successfully done this, so from there we're in uncharted waters but it's hardly obvious that it is an effective procedure.

In contrast the Westminster Parliament routinely disposes of Prime Ministers who lose its confidence, it's already happened once in my lifetime and it's not some multi-week procedure in which there's some performance of a judicial process, just a simple question: Does this Government retain the Confidence of the House?

Margaret Thatcher decided on this course of action on a Monday, on Wednesday morning she rose to say, "Mr. Speaker, I beg to move, 'That this House has no confidence in Her Majesty's Government.'" and by the next morning the Callaghan minority government had fallen.

The length of time the process takes is entirely under the control of Congress. It could be done in a day if they wanted. The longer time periods seen with Clinton and Trump were to attempt to gin up the political support to follow through.

I was concerned with facts, whereas you seem focused on a fantasy about how you wish things were. But your fantasy doesn't matter at all. US-style Presidential Republics are a known bad design, the US nation building projects stopped doing this themselves because it doesn't work, the United States itself is just a slower decay, it's not an exception.

The problem wasn't the Crown, that's the big takeaway. Giving the same power to a guy who doesn't have a hat doesn't fix the problem. You need to hold this much power in commission, that's the lesson that gave us the present British arrangement - the Lord High Treasurer was much too powerful, so his power was given to a commission, today its First Lord though not nearly as powerful as the Lord Treasurer, is too powerful, that's the Prime Minister you gestured at - the formal office is "First Lord of the Treasury", with the Chancellor being Second Lord, and the whips taking subsidiary parts of the commission. If you ask me we should further re-divide this power.

But just giving all that power to one man (and in the US it has always been a man) is even worse. The US President has powers that a King had, which made sense in the 18th century but stands out today - that's why Trump can corruptly pardon people for example.

It's really baffling to see this take repeated, especially when we've seen European PMs rewrite their country's constitution. That's just not feasible in the US system. US Presidents are quite limited in their power. A lot of (justified) outrage occurs over the US President doing something that PMs can typically do with no issue.

You seem fixated on the practical process of removing one from power, which is of course irrelevant as long as their party backs them, which is the actual threat in both cases. In either case, if the legislature does not back them, they can be removed from power with little issue.

I see in a sibling comment you think this is actually a weakness of the US system...apparently the PM radically changing all the laws, norms, and unwritten constitution of his country is "not powerful", while the US President typically fighting a battle to get one single major piece of legislation through in his career is unitarian dictatorship?

> , the US nation building projects stopped doing this themselves because it doesn't work, the United States itself is just a slower decay, it's not an exception.

The US nation building projects felt that parliamentary democracies were easier to control, as direct election of Presidential executives sometimes leads to democracies electing leaders who are able to carry out policies that violate US interests.

I'm sure it is baffling, why are all these stupid facts contradicting your nice simple truth? Because it's a fantasy.

> We see PMs easily enacting massive legislative reforms and even Constitutional changes that are nigh impossible in the US

I'm responding to this part separately because it's a very different issue. The existence of "superior law" in the form of a written constitution, is very silly. There need be only a single law, the law of the land - and the legislature must be able to change it - and only them, otherwise why have a legislature at all?

These are only man's laws, they're no different than the laws of Football ("soccer") for example, they are not facts about the world like Mother Nature's Laws - and so to hold some of these laws superior to others is a waste of everybody's time. The resulting paralysis in the US is not something to be praised, it's just another rusted joint, a lost degree of flexibility and so a point of weakness.

In reality, the supposed "impossible" constitutional changes in the US simply enable learned helplessness. Democratic representatives weep that alas much as they wish otherwise they "cannot" fix obvious problems because change is "impossible" and then of course somebody who actually does want to change things just does and says (as we might expect remembering these are only man's laws) if you don't like it too fucking bad.

> There need be only a single law, the law of the land - and the legislature must be able to change it - and only them, otherwise why have a legislature at all?

The legislature can change the US Constitution. The federal Congress proposes an amendment with a 2/3rds yes-vote, then it must be ratified by legislatures of 3/4ths of the states.

The reason to make some laws harder to change than others is to protect civil rights. In the US, it is very difficult to legally infringe on the right to free speech, for example. In the UK, it is simply a matter of a majority vote in Parliament.

> Democratic representatives weep that alas much as they wish otherwise they "cannot" fix obvious problems because change is "impossible" and then of course somebody who actually does want to change things just does and says (as we might expect remembering these are only man's laws) if you don't like it too fucking bad.

Passing Constitutional amendments is perfectly feasible and has been done many times. It just can't be done without majority political support and the will to do so. They've been passed and "repealed" before, with Prohibition, for example.

A lot of kvetching in the US system (on both sides) comes from people whose ideas are simply not very popular and would like to change the rules so they win. In a democratic society, you need majorities of the population to agree. For larger changes, you preferable want larger majorities.

>We see PMs easily enacting massive legislative reforms and even Constitutional changes that are nigh impossible in the US

I don't know about UK but in Australia we need a Referendum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendums_in_Australia) to change the constitution and those have been historically extremely difficult to pass (only 8/45). The PM absolutely cannot alter the Constitution.

Yeah, it’s dangerous to generalize parliamentary systems too broadly. That isn’t the case in all of them. But as you can see in his comments, he thinks that having “constitutional” laws above other laws is also a bad idea.

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